The growing popularity of cults in a transient, fragmented state of contemporary society

From Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems, by Alexandra Stein loc 6540 and 6588:

But the transient, fragmented state of contemporary society makes this difficult. The world is opening up, becoming global, restructuring itself toward an unknown future. This global sense of anomie engenders a basic existential crisis and fear. In isolation the fear response triggers attachment behavior regardless of the adaptive nature of such behavior in a given situation. Without open, flexible and responsive social supports, there is, therefore, a vast pool of atomized individuals vulnerable to charismatic authoritarian personalities.ii We see this in any number of ways: in the Western countries, particularly those with intensifying isolation and atomization such as the United States, we see fundamentalist totalizing ideologies, cults, religious and political movements and gang activity on the rise.

it is critical to minimize the development of disorganized attachment through interventions and support to protect children who live in frightening, isolated environments.

#AlexandraStein #anomie #civilisationalCollapse #cultStudies #cults #postNeoliberalism #postpandemicCivics

Some thoughts about Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism

I felt this was a really important book but there’s a risk it could be misconstrued. A core element of the argument is far from new: complex socioeconomic forces are prone to coalesce into the figure of enemies who then organise the free-floating anxiety. My reference points for this idea are, in different ways, Arendt, Zizek and Butler. Seymour’s reference points are the political sociology and social psychology of fascism. It’s an idea we should be attending to closely at the moment, but it’s not a new argument.

I can see how some readers might come away feeling Seymour is reinventing the wheel here and missing the real contribution he’s making. What I think is novel and timely is how Seymour combines this familiar argument with three other factors:

• The role of social platforms in organising this demonology, as well as creating incentives for people to profit off the process.
• The sociology of disasters as well as the particular energy it lends to demonology, as an attempt to cope with something overwhelming.
• The spiralling proliferation of such disasters on a dying planet, as well as what this means for those first two mechanisms.

I want to better understand how he sees the connections between slow motion disasters like austerity and immediate catastrophes such as devastating wild fires. In essence I think he’s saying that the platformisation of social life organises the anxiety which emerges from these disasters, as well as enabling people to profit from it at all levels from local true believers through to grifter influencers and aspiring despots. The really terrifying thing is the feedback loops this opens up, which as he points out are not new when you crack open the shell of historical totalitarian societies, as well as what this means for the possibility of constraining spiralling diasters.

#civilisationalCollapse #climateCrisis #farRight #fascism #postPandemicCivics #richardSeymour

I wouldn’t normally link to Youtube (even if it is via Invidious) but this chat between Mike Berners-Lee and @GreenRupertRead on ways of tackling the #polycrisis is worth the 40 minutes of lughole infiltration. 👂

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=QLuw6izcP9A

“There’s no way that politicians are ever going to lead us from the front through this, we have to push them into a position where they start to lead us.”

#ClimateAction #GlobalFutures #AI #EthicalConsumption #Renewables #CivilisationalCollapse #TippingPoint #TheoryOfChange #Degrowth